Yes, I found this scene painfully long and bad acted, specially Kidman's part. At the same time, there is something that bothered me:
- Why Kidman was so upset about the dream where men have sex with her? C'mon. She was enjoying the dream so there is no reason to cry and be so upset.
The entire film deserves a prize for the worst acting.
shareIt's a pivotal scene that establishes this couple's conflict. But Kidman acts like someone who's never smoked grass before. I sometimes giggle when she starts shrieking her absurd battle of the sexes speech,"Millions of years of evolution--right? RIGHT??!"
shareWhy would Bill - who was in the dark about pretty much everything at the start - be right about the nature of the drug taken?
I always take it that whatever she took... ...wasn't only pot.
=======================================
Happy birthday to the ground!!!
That scene made me wonder if Nicole Kidman has never once experienced what it feels like to be high. She seemed to be playing more drunk than stoned.
And meanwhile on Mushroom Hill this happened https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IlnOiJWUdo
Why Kidman was so upset about the dream where men have sex with her? C'mon. She was enjoying the dream so there is no reason to cry and be so upset.
"Why Kidman was so upset about the dream where men have sex with her? C'mon. She was enjoying the dream so there is no reason to cry and be so upset."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"For one, she was upset upon waking because she was enjoying the dream."
Exactly. This was the horror, this is what was traumatic about the dream. What the scene confirms is that we do not wake from a dream in order to return to the 'real world', but to escape from the traumatic Real of the dream itself. Dreams, in this sense, are not some simple escape from reality, but are a realization of desire, of the real of desire, and that it is quotidian waking reality that is escapist: we seek refuge, escape into, ordinary everyday social-symbolic reality to escape the nightmare, to repress the traumatic Real.
Everyone has such dreams, filled with all manner of deranged horrors. To say that nobody should be 'upset' about this is to completely miss the point: if say, your dream was one in which you are a mass murderer, slaughtering your whole family (like Jack Torrance in "The Shining"), 'enjoying it', might you get a little 'upset' about such a nightmarish dream?
If a woman has a nightmare dream in which she is gang-raped, it is not because this is what she would like to happen in her everyday life (such 'reasoning' is the standard-issue male fantasy about such dreams, and totally false); rather, it is the complete reverse: such a happening would be the ultimate horror, the end, a total breakdown. In the same way as when you watch a catastrophe movie, all those films about some devastating event, fantasy scenarios about the destruction of the planet or large chunks of it, etc, of which there are thousands such movies, this doesn't imply that either you or the filmmakers are literally desiring this to happen, want to actively realize it, bring it about, are deranged terrorists intent on destroying the whole world ... unless they or the viewers are tragically psychotic basket-cases ...
Here, we can directly compare Alice Harford's nightmare dream in "Eyes Wide Shut" with Jack Torrance's equally nightmarish dream in "The Shining": in the latter film, Jack's wife Wendy hears Jack shouting while she is in the basement of the Overlook Hotel checking the boilers. Rushing up to him in the Colorado Lounge she wakes him from his nightmare and, still confused, disoriented, fearful and frightened, Jack recollects his nightmare dream to Wendy, telling her that in the dream he murders his family, chops up Wendy and his son Danny with an axe. Clearly, Jack is 'upset' about this in the scene, about these unconscious desires. The problem, of course, is that Jack is becoming more and more psychotic, eventually short-circuiting the distinction between his everyday reality and his deranged unconscious desires, until he actualizes his nightmare, acts out those mad desires in reality itself, with tragic consequences.
Acting out your unconscious fantasies/dreams in reality itself - the psychotic gesture, psychotic enjoyment - is what is properly called a Nightmare, is always a disaster. Which is why everyone intensely avoids realising their most inner-directed, innermost dreams/fantasies, resists them, because their whole world would disintegrate. Unless of course they are psychotic or have become psychotic ... like Jack Torrance.
Acting out your unconscious fantasies/dreams in reality itself - the psychotic gesture, psychotic enjoyment - is what is properly called a Nightmare, is always a disaster. Which is why everyone intensely avoids realising their most inner-directed, innermost dreams/fantasies, resists them, because their whole world would disintegrate.
"Acting out your unconscious fantasies/dreams in reality itself - the psychotic gesture, psychotic enjoyment - is what is properly called a Nightmare, is always a disaster. Which is why everyone intensely avoids realising their most inner-directed, innermost dreams/fantasies, resists them, because their whole world would disintegrate."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Unless of course you're part of the ultra-elite and can mask yourself while debauching in anonymity."
Yes, engage in hidden obscene transgression. They engage in such behaviour outside the public gaze, outside the gaze of the 'big Other', the official public-symbolic order (not in order to escape from it, but in order to preserve it, continue it, conform to it, to the system). And this is why the likes of Ziegler goes to such extreme lengths to silence Bill Harford, including having Nick Nightingale assaulted and despatched. By keeping all their vulgar and criminal transgressions hidden (even though everyone might be aware of them in private, like Bill), they can delude themselves into believing that they are not 'really' happening, or that they are all just a 'charade', not to be taken seriously, just a joke ... because the big Other doesn't know, doesn't see, isn't aware of it, is a blind idiot who knows nothing, and who doesn't even exist, is just a fiction too.
This is called perversion, the perverse libidinal economy of the Zieglers of the world, whereas Jack Torrance goes a step further, goes from perversion to full (murderous/suicidal) psychosis. Whereas Ziegler is 'just' a psychopath (a charmer in the official social world, a monster in private), Torrance is a psychotic.
Jack Torrance goes a step further, goes from perversion to full (murderous/suicidal) psychosis. Whereas Ziegler is 'just' a psychopath (a charmer in the official social world, a monster in private), Torrance is a psychotic.
"I'm enjoying the comparison between both characters and their, uhm... vices. It's sad that Jack's condition completely takes over, it's feral. Ziegler is free to carry on as long as the curtain is kept closed"
---------------------------------------------------------------------
In a way, though, the protagonist in EWS, Bill Harford, needs to be contrasted or compared with the protagonist of "The Shining", Jack Torrance (though here, the film really has three protagonists/antagonists, as the film devotes as much time and attention to Danny and Wendy as it does to Jack: a classic Oedipal triangle, a 'classic' family melodrama but now seen from all perspectives as it descends into horror), of Bill's journey into an eventual 'subjective destitution', his breakdown and how he, and his wife Alice resolve to deal with it.
"But poor Jack, his first big (psychotic) break and he ends with it."
It might be because Jack Torrance decides (or resolves) to completely escape from, cut himself off from, his (former) everyday reality, or so he believes or wishes. He ostensibly goes to the Overlook to write The Great Novel while lording it over ('overlooking') his new domain, but this is all just daydreaming, just wishful imagining, as his real desires much more disturbing; in actuality, he's in 'radical denial' ('overlooking' in its other sense), denying/repressing the hard truths about himself - an abusive, violent man who has already attacked his son, lost his teaching job after assaulting school kids, despises his wife, seeks refuge in alcohol, making him worse - a failed father, husband, writer, teacher, who thinks he can escape into the Imaginary, the homely, enwombing realm of the Overlook and all it might have to offer. Then the spectres emerge (which, tellingly, bizarrely, he communes with as if they are regular ordinary empirical beings, obscene ghosts from the past - both the Overlook's and Jack's - that encourage him to realize his dark fantasies), and Jack decides to cut himself off even more, destroying the radio, sabotaging the Snocat. And the more complete his hermetic withdrawal from all reality, from the OUTSIDE, the more that outside starts to take him over, and the more paranoiac he becomes, everyone else now seen as an unbearable intrusion into his unhinged fantasy bubble: the more you deny or seek to escape from the Real, the more incessantly it insists, the more overpowering it becomes ... until ... until he explodes in an impotent, helpless, suicidal act of violence ... 'taking care of business', The Caretaker. For the Management, Orders From The House ... obeying orders in order to play, to 'enjoy', enjoy doing his duty (murdering his family), a duty to enjoy ... Patriarchal dementia: "All work and no play makes ...".
I read that description of Jack's breakdown in the film, becoming more psychotic-paranoiac as he shuts out the world around him, and I can't help but think of the Trumpers (what with his reactionary, faux-nostalgic plea to "make America great again," or the Tea Partiers, or the Establishment Democrats (as odious and self-serving and hypocritical as the Establishment GOP), or really an uncomfortably large amount of people today regardless of their self-professed politics. One of the things that Kubrick's films do is they somehow always seem timeless, always relate to contemporary reality/geopolitics/power relations/psychology/etc -- precisely because they are so "broadly" drawn, for lack of a better term, because they have this archetypal, objectively-viewed, nonspecific picture of the world, a word that could be 1980 just as much as 1788 or the paleolithic era or 1916 or 2016.
I liked your comparison of the central "dream sequences" -- rather, post-dream sequences -- of both TS and EWS. Somehow never made that direct connection before. Just as Alice's dream points right back to two scenes before it, her own confession about the naval officer and Bill's previous nightmare journey at Somerton, Jack's horrific nightmare looks forward, predicts what he will do in the future. These later Kubrick films are almost like Mobius strips -- like Lynch's but less overt about it -- all twisting and turning on a nonlinear wheel of time in which past, present and future are all conflated.
In reality ‘the Trumpers’ proved to be, and remain, a model of sanity - especially when compared to the utterly insane, psychotic, narcissistic, civilisation-rotting cult that is the Woke Left.
shareDreams, in this sense, are not some simple escape from reality, but are a realization of desire, of the real of desire, and that it is quotidian waking reality that is escapist: we seek refuge, escape into, ordinary everyday social-symbolic reality to escape the nightmare, to repress the traumatic Real.
Kidman's 'acting' really got on my nerves during this scene - I was almost tempted to walk out of the cinema. It was also stupid acting during the party at the beginning when she was smooching while dancing with that guy.
I am not a big Cruise fan but he was OK in this film. But Kidman - how does she get away with such bad acting? It put me off Moulin Rouge as well.
It was only OK in Stepford Wives simply because that film was over-the-top and kitsch, so her bad acting fitted in. The film was great fun overall.
As for this one, I love so many of Kubrick's films but this one didn't quite work for me.
Consider this of her acting - she would not have been cast had she not been married to Tom Cruise playing Bill. Much of the realism Kubrick was after would be rooted in the real life tensions of that marriage.
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
Fair point. Pity though - I quite enjoyed the film whenever she wasn't on screen.
shareFair enough. But her presence is felt off screen and is sufficiently portrayed as deeply inherent within Bill's thinking and feeling in the story. I liked her performance, but it took a few times to see more than just 'over acting'. Real people 'over act' in life all the time, especially with arguments between couples. And performance itself is a key theme in the film, the rehearsal, the routine, the ritual.
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
Fair enough. But her presence is felt off screen and is sufficiently portrayed as deeply inherent within Bill's thinking and feeling in the story. I liked her performance, but it took a few times to see more than just 'over acting'. Real people 'over act' in life all the time, especially with arguments between couples. And performance itself is a key theme in the film, the rehearsal, the routine, the ritual.Tension/non-tension in a marriage does not necessarily get transferred to the acting when CUT is announced. Actors are nor that immersed or out of touch. That is pretentiousness. More pretension in complimenting Kidman for feeling her presence while off the screen. Not hardly. She's off the screen, she's off. (the only tension is Cruise's gal-pal bearding for his homosexuality by one, or both homosexual "spouses")